The most vicious battle on the Net today is a secret war between techies. At stake is nothing less than the organization of cyberspace.

By Steve G. Steinberg

It was a frequent observation among the laptop-toting 25-year-olds who crowded into the UC San Diego auditorium on an overcast morning last February that if a bomb were to go off right then, the entire Internet would collapse. It was the kind of braggadocio you hear among any large gathering of engineers, but, in this case, it was probably true.

The 250 engineers who filled the dark, wood-paneled auditorium during the two-day meeting of NANOG, the North American Network Operators' Group, were from America's largest Internet service providers - companies like UUNet, Netcom, and Sprint - and they possessed the self-confidence that comes from operating millions of dollars of bleeding-edge technology that the world increasingly depends on. They were the builders of a new age, and although lacking the brawn and defined cheekbones of the engineers in Soviet propaganda posters, they emanated the same heroic attitude of advancing civilization through Herculean struggles.

The first technical presentation that morning was by Warren Williams, a genial, chubby guy in charge of the Pacific
Bell network access point, or NAP. NAPs are
a lot like freeway cloverleaves - they
allow traffic to flow between
the independent networks that make up the Internet. Williams's big news was that PacBell was about to upgrade its NAP with higher-speed equipment that uses ATM - or asynchronous transfer mode - technology. By taking advantage of ATM, he explained, networks will soon be able to exchange traffic at speeds of up to 660 Mbps, instead of the current maximum of 45 Mbps. While most of the audience listened with a fair amount of interest, laughter kept erupting from a small cluster behind me.

That dissident cluster, I learned from the person sitting next to me, included some of the most important engineers in the room: people like John Curran, the chief technical officer for BBNPlanet; Yakov Rekhter, a lead engineer at Cisco; and Sean Doran, the lead engineer for Sprint's Internet services. These people, the engineer next to me said, believe ATM is a flawed technology, one that causes more problems than it solves. They see PacBell's in-terest in it as further proof that the RBOCs are doomed to be incompetent bumblers whenever they move away from their beloved voice networks.

Listening to my neighbor, I felt as if a curtain had been stripped away, exposing a hidden side of the industry - and revealing that much of what I thought I knew about ATM was wrong.

For years, the conventional wisdom has been that ATM will be the savior of the Internet - ending bandwidth scarcity and bringing about a new era of network reliability. As a computer science grad student, I had been taught that ATM was an elegant solution for the 21st century. The technology is routinely described by the computer trade press as revolutionary and inevitable. It has the backing of everyone from AT&AMPT to Microsoft to Sun. Yet, I now discovered, some of the world's smartest and most powerful Internet engineers find the technology laughable.

This discrepancy, it turns out, is not just a minor anomaly or the result of a few opinionated extremists. It is a critical battle in a war between two fundamentally opposed groups of engineers. This war has been largely invisible to even the most tuned-in netizen and has remained completely hidden to the world's telecommunications customers. Yet both groups will be immensely affected by its eventual outcome. Like most wars, it has ancient origins, blurred by the mists of time, which go back, say, three decades. And like most wars, it is being fought over differences that might appear terribly minor.

It is a war between the Bellheads and the Netheads. In broad strokes, Bellheads are the original telephone people. They are the engineers and managers who grew up under the watchful eye of Ma Bell and who continue to abide by Bell System practices out of respect for Her legacy. They believe in solving problems with dependable hardware techniques and in rigorous quality control - ideals that form the basis of our robust phone system and that are incorporated in the ATM protocol.

Opposed to the Bellheads are the Netheads, the young Turks who connected the world's computers to form the Internet. These engineers see the telecom industry as one more relic that will be overturned by the march of digital computing. The Netheads believe in intelligent software rather than brute-force hardware, in flexible and adaptive routing instead of fixed traffic control. It is these ideals, after all, that have allowed the Internet to grow so quickly and that are incorporated into IP - the Internet
Protocol.